Before our eyes, and in ways no-one could have predicted, the map of the Middle East is being re-cast by civil war, tribal conflict, and a bloody jihadist movement spreading across frontiers.

When a Tunisian street vendor immolated himself in December 2010, less than four years ago, not a single commentator discerned the beginning of a great unravelling that would threaten a flimsy post-WW1 drawing of lines on a map.

Back in 2010 and an event that heralded an Arab Spring that brought regimes crashing down in Tunisia itself, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, and contributed to a long-running civil war in Syria, Islamic State (also known by the acronym ISIS) had not yet emerged.

If IS existed at all in the jihadist shadows it originated in an offshoot loosely affiliated – only loosely – with al-Qaeda.

No-one could’ve predicted that in the blink of an eye IS would have evolved from its roots in Iraq during the American occupation and later in the Syrian civil war to the point now where it is challenging an entire Middle East construct, and the sovereignty of the Iraqi state in particular.

In the process, IS is threatening to impose a transnational Islamic state across the boundaries of Syria and Iraq in one of the more astonishing developments of recent world history.

What seemed like a desert mirage has proved to be something altogether different driven partly by a powerful weapon in the hands of insurrectionists – social media. Even the most perceptive historians could not possibly have imagined anything like this.

In his classic, A Peace To End All Peace, American author David Fromkin concluded in 1989: “The allies proposed a post-Ottoman design for the region in the early 1920s. The continuing question is whether the peoples of the region will accept it.’’

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What is clear after the events of recent weeks is that a jihadist movement, now a self-declared Islamic state, or caliphate, does not accept boundaries drawn on a map by British and French officials a century ago, and defended by an international community fearful of the consequences of what is taking place now.

In Sydney last week at AUSMIN talks between US Secretary of State
John Kerry
, Defence Secretary
Chuck Hagel
and Australian counterparts,
Julie Bishop
and
David Johnston
officials were preoccupied with how to stabilise Iraq and thus avoid risks of further fragmentation. Kerry and Hagel, and their advisers, would not have needed reminding of the consequences of additional territorial gains by ISIS forces.

Advances towards the Kurdish stronghold of Erbil in Iraq’s north-east and south towards the oil-rich town of Kirkuk would have exerted immense additional pressures on what is left of the Iraqi state, now fragmenting before our eyes.

a country torn apart

Kerry’s warnings to outgoing Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki
to hand over to a successor peaceably in what has the makings of a constitutional coup were aimed at re-setting attempts to unify a country torn apart by years of bloody sectarian conflict since a US invasion in 2003.

Prime Minister
Tony Abbott
was not understating the challenge to the West in its efforts to stop a country at the heart of the Arab world falling apart with consequences for its neighbours to the west, and south, notably Jordan on Iraq’s western perimeter and the oil-rich Gulf states to the south.

To the east Iran watches and waits and seeks to influence events to its advantage.

“The world is no longer confronting an evil terrorist group, but a highly potent terrorist army,’’ Abbott said in a statement before leaving for the Netherlands and Britain. IS, he said, “is armed with tanks and other modern weapons. It has shown it is capable of holding territory, imposing its own abhorrent form of government and forging alliances with other extremist organisations. It must be defeated.’’

In the case of the latter observation it is not clear what Abbott means beyond the need to contain IS from further gains. “Defeating’’ IS, like defeating Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon is easier said than done.

Drawing on history going back to the era of T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), and the Arab revolt nearly a century ago, meddling in Middle East sands has not proved particularly productive.

Ask Anthony Eden whose prime ministership was all but wrecked by an ill-advised intervention in Egypt in 1956 to take control of the Suez Canal in league with France and Israel.

George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq in 2003 is the most recent of ill-fated interventions in a region that is unforgiving for the unwary.

The cost to the US exchequer of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is approaching $US2 trillion, and counting.

Resumption of US air strikes against IS positions, and a stepped-up humanitarian effort will be adding to those costs. So, who is to blame for a Middle East mess, apart from more recent interveners and militant Islam itself.

History casts its unforgiving gaze

History casts its unforgiving gaze in the direction of French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot, and British politician Sir Mark Sykes.

In collaboration with representatives of Czarist Russia, the two negotiated secret protocols between November 1915 and March 1916 to carve the Middle East into French, British and Russian spheres of influence following the anticipated disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

The Russians were minor players in a covenant known as the Asia Minor Agreement. Under this agreement French influence would extend to south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Britain’s colonial spoils would include the coastal strip between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, Jordan itself, southern Iraq, and the ports of Acre and Haifa in what is now Israel. Russia was left with Istanbul, the Turkish straits connecting to its Black Sea ports, and Armenian settlements.

Individual powers would draw the boundaries within areas under their control. Under a post-World War I settlement the Sykes-Picot agreement would inform what became lines on the map without Russian participation following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Mischievously, the Bolsheviks published the secret protocols to the discomfort of conniving French and British diplomacy.

Mixed up in all of this was the push by a Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine given encouragement by Prime Minister David Lloyd George who championed arguments for such an outcome.

These were fateful moments given all that has transpired since, including the United Nations 1947 vote to partition Palestine in which the foreign minister in the Chifley government, Herbert Vere Evatt played an important role.

Georgetown University academic Gabriel Scheinmann has produced a useful summary of what transpired post-WW1.

“Much as it did in Europe, WW1 radically changed the political geography of the Middle East . . . the victorious allies transformed the [region] into its current form, with its European-designed names, flags and borders,’’ Scheinmann writes. “Ottoman provinces became Arab kingdoms, while Christian and Jewish enclaves were carved out in Lebanon and Palestine. Syria, Libya and Palestine were given names resurrected from Roman antiquity.’’

borders determined neither by topography nor demography

Names and symbols of these new states imposed by the imperial powers had little connection with their inhabitants, and borders were determined neither by topography nor demography.

Fatefully, no separate provision was made for Kurds scattered between Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, contributing to the dislocations that have arisen from a Kurdish desire for a homeland.

Minorities were distributed across the region, including the Alawites in Syria, the Druze in various locations, and pockets of Turkomens, Assyrians, Yazidis and Chaldeans. Minorities ruled, often repressively, at the dawn of 21st century Lebanon, Syria and Bahrain. This could not last, and so it has proved.

But the dilemma for all was what happens when artificial boundaries fracture under the weight of zealot movements that do not respect such divisions.

As Scheinmann observes: “Western reluctance to contemplate re-drawing the map of the Middle East is understandable. Partition smacks of imperialism and war . . . Moreover, inviolable political borders are the defining characteristics of the sovereign nation-state.

“Without sovereignty the modern concept of citizenship or nationality is meaningless.’’

In a great unravelling the question and the challenge for the US and its allies may well prove to be: what will be the cost of preserving lines on a map that do not bear much relation to realities on the ground against a jihadist tide.